SGAC is again partnering with the International Astronomical Search Collaboration (IASC=”Isaac”) for a SGAC Search Campaign, called “Find An Asteroid”. Up to 15 teams formed by SGAC members (aged 18-35) will be selected to participate in this campaign.
The Search Campaign itself will last for five weeks from 14 August – 18 September, 2013. Typically your team will get 3-5 image sets per week. This is an average depending upon factors such as the Moon and weather. It takes about 20 minutes to analyse one set. This means you can expect an average workload of 1.5 – 2.5 hours per week. If viewing conditions are good, you might receive image sets daily in which case you would expect to spend 3.5 hours per week.The image analysis is done with Astrometrica, an easy to use software package provided by IASC.
UKSEDS are planning on forming a team through its membership. If you want to seek to discover an asteroid, we require just three to five UKSEDS members. The application deadline is 1st June, 2013. More information can be found here: http://spacegeneration.org/faa
Please e-mail ‘asteroid@ukseds.org‘ if you are interested in joining our team or for further information.
Merlin Barschke, a CranSEDS member who graduated from Cranfield in 2011 and is currently working as Project Manager for two nanosatellites at TU Berlin, needs your support!
“We are planning to prepare a Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) on Space Technology. The course will cover the basics of space technology ranging from satellites to space law. The workload will be equivalent to a 6 ECTS university course. TU Berlin is applying for founding through the MOOC Fellowship program (https://moocfellowship.org). In case of a successful application, the Space Technology MOOC will be offered free of charge in summer term 2014. Please help us to promote space science and to create a free MOOC on the basics of Space Technology by voting for our course at: https://moocfellowship.org/submissions/space-technology.”
Please help support the cause and sign up to vote online, it only takes a minute and if successful you could be taking the online course for free next year too!
Steve Randall teaching ICSEDS members how to fill the balloons. Photo Credit: Kishan, ICSEDS
Last Sunday, members of Imperial College Students for the Exploration and Development of Space (ICSEDS) travelled to Elsworth, Cambridgeshire, for their first launch trip. The aim was to launch two high altitude balloons (HABs) and several model rockets built over the course of the year.
The two HABs were the culmination of ICSEDS’s very own space race, with teams Alpha and Omega competing to design and launch a HAB able to take photographs of the curvature of the Earth for the lowest cost. Team Alpha chose to use a second hand HTC Desire smartphone, providing them with a camera, GPS tracker, battery, and processor in one package. Meanwhile Team Omega built their payload from scratch, using two Arduinos and a variety of sensors to track their balloon’s location, altitude and capture images.
Sadly, despite the wonderful weather and favourable wind conditions the teams lost signal with their GPS trackers, though another group of high altitude balloonists picked up one of the signals during the ascent. Lesson learnt: we need to invest in more powerful ground tracking equipment and a bigger antenna! We have started an online campaign to see if anyone finds them more information can be found on: www.union.ic.ac.uk/guilds/icseds/help-us-find-our-habs/
UKSEDS & ICSEDS Project Officer, TeeJay Taiwo, prepares his rockets for his license assesment. Photo credit: Kishan, ICSEDS
Alongside these HAB launches, members were also able to launch their very own model rockets, and unlike the HABs we had a 100% retrieval success rate! The most impressive of the rockets was that of our project officer (both ICSEDS and UKSEDS), TeeJay Taiwo, who was launching a rocket just under a meter long with a H125 motor (average thrust 125N compared to the 1N to 3N A-class starting motors our other members had) in order to obtain his level 1 certification. We are happy to announce he passed the assessment after an exemplary launch, and this will allow ICSEDS to launch high powered rockets under his supervision in the future.
ICSEDS would like to thank the Imperial College Chemical Engineering Department, for donating the helium for both teams; Steve Randall, for kindly offering his time and expertise at the launch, Kishan for being our photographer, and our Project Officer’s family members for volunteering to drive the helium tanks to the launch site.
Part of team Omega’s HAB payload and some of the model rockets launched. Photo credit: Kishan, ICSEDS
The 10th March to the 21st April saw UKSEDS’ continued involvement with the Pan-STARRS Asteroid Search campaign. Overall the campaign was a great success with a record 1219 preliminary asteroid discoveries and 274 provisional discoveries being made by fifty-six teams all across the globe. Our own members, Chris Lavis, Owen Roberts and Thomas Goodfellow were responsible for eighteen of those preliminary discoveries, as well as two provisional discoveries, 2013 EA48 and 2013 EM52. After more observations are made of the two asteroids to enable a more precise definition of their orbits, 2013 EA48 and 2013 EM52 will be awarded numbered status and our lucky discoverers will be able to propose a name for their asteroids.
This has been the third asteroid search campaign UKSEDS has participated in and has been our most successful one to date. Here’s hoping our rise in success carries on with future campaigns! For anyone who would like to get involved with an asteroid search campaign, the Space Generation Advisory Council’s (SGAC) Find an Asteroid campaign is just around the corner. You too, like Chris, Owen and Tom, could help find and name your own asteroid! Get in touch at: asteroid@ukseds.org.
On behalf of the team, I’d like to thank all those at the International Asteroid Search Collaboration (IASC) for making this happen and say a huge thank-you to Nick Howes for all of his support and technical help. You can find out more about Nick Howes and the impressive work he does by following him on twitter.
More info on how minor planets are named can be found here.
By Ranji Gogoi
The Space Internship Network (SpIN) has been designed to provide an introductory link for undergraduate students considering employment in the Space sector, and employers looking to find the most talented and enthusiastic people to ensure the future success of their business. The scheme is open to anyone studying towards an appropriate degree, and in their 2nd year (or 3rd year for 4 year courses).
You could earn up to £1500 per month and gain experience working within a relevant organisation giving insight into the real world of applying the skills and knowledge you are acquiring at university. Leaving university and heading out onto the job market for the first time can be daunting, and having an extra achievement in the form of a successfully completed internship could help you stand out from the crowd.
You must register your details before you start applying. You need to do this at: https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/PXFNZYM
Prepare your CV and send it with a covering letter, detailing why you believe you have good skills for the placement and what you would like to get out of it, to the supervisor of the project by Friday 3rd May 2013.
Download the full list of SpIN internships here: SpIN Placement Opportunities (pdf)
Over the weekend of the 22nd and 23rd of March a team of ICSEDS members joined other volunteers and professionals at the UK Space Design Competition (UKSDC) finals at Imperial College London.
The UKSDC is a weekend residential competition open to all year 10 – 13 students in the UK. The UK finals are held at Imperial College London. Student teams are selected based either video responses to an initial request for proposals or by winning a regional competition. This year saw the students designing a lunar-orbiting port settlement for 5000 inhabitants. Four teams of 40 students each, from NUMBER different schools from across the UK, compete to win the ‘contract’ with ‘the Foundation’. The teams have only 1 day in which to design, plan and budget a full settlement concept before presenting to the judges first thing on Sunday morning. The winning team then have to select 12 members to send on to the International Space Settlement Design Competition, held annually at NASA’s Lyndon. B, Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas, USA.
“The International Space Settlement Design competition, established first as a US competition in 1984, aims to combine a real insight into the pressures and needs of industry, combined with a brief to capture imaginations.”
Despite the snow trying it’s best to stop the students from making it into college and the obligatory technological mishaps that come hand in hand with electronic deadlines, the final presentations and judging on Sunday went smoothly, and we soon witnessed the annual ecstatic screams of the winning team, and sadly the looks of disappointment from the rest of the students. This year’s competition saw the promotion of four ICSEDS members onto the judging panel for the competition: Joseph Dudley, Adam Braithwaite, Evan Meyrick and Zoe Versey. Vidyasagar Ananthan should also have been on the panel however was unable to attend on the Sunday.
The winning team 2013 – Photo Credit: UKSDC and M. ARVIDSON
The competition is not solely aimed at getting school students interested in the space industry but calls upon and builds their skills in leadership, public speaking and management amongst others. Even students with no interest in becoming scientists or engineers find themselves gaining valuable skills for their future. This said it of course does a great job of promoting STEM subjects, I actually had the pleasure of meeting our ICSEDS Vice-Chair, also UKSEDS membership officer (previously PR officer), Joseph Dudley, while he was in his second year as a competitor in the UKSDC, and he is now studying Aeronautical Engineering at Imperial.
ICSEDS members have been involved with the UK finals since 2011. The next year saw many more current ICSEDS members sign up and this year was our biggest involvement yet, with ICSEDS members Joseph Dudley, Vidyasagar Ananthan, Evan Meyrick and Adam Braithwaite also being involved in running and judging the regional competition in Cardiff.
ICSEDS chair 2012/13 (front row 3rd from left), PR Officer 2012/13 (back row 2nd from left), Outreach Officer 2012/13 (back row 4th from right) and Outreach Officer 2013/14 (back row 4th from left) with the UKSDC organising team and volunteers 2012.
I’d like to thank all the ICSEDS volunteers who attended for committing their time and energy to the project.
Special thanks go out to Dr Randall Perry, founder and chair of the UKSDC, for inviting new ICSEDS members into his team of volunteers, Anita Gale, co-founder of the International Space Settlement Design competition, for developing the international competition and her wonderful stories about working at NASA, Allison Hearn for her enthusiasm on further collaboration between UKSDC and IC/UKSEDS, and the rest of the organising team for their brilliant work.
More information on the competition can be found on the UKSDC website – www.uksdc.org
The UKSDC is supported by: The Space, Science and Engineering Foundation; Imperial College London; The UK Space Agency; The Impacts and Astromaterials Research Center and The Astrobiology Society of Britain.
Here’s a short documentary video on the competition:
UKSEDS will be compiling pictures of all the Yuri’s Night events from across the UK and publishing them on the UKSEDS website. If you participate in a Yuri’s Night event this year, please remember to take some photographs and send them to UKSEDS’ media team at: media@ukseds.org UKSEDS looks forward to sharing your Yuri’s Night experiences with the entire community!
About Yuri’s Night
Yuri’s Night is a global celebration of humanity’s past, present, and future in space. Yuri’s Night parties and events are held around the world every April in commemoration of April 12, 1961, the day of cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin’s first manned spaceflight, and April 12, 1981, the inaugural launch of NASA’s Space Shuttle. Yuri’s Night events combine space-themed partying with education and outreach. These events can range from an all-night mix of techno and technology at a science centre, to a film night or stargazing at your local society, to a gathering of friends at a bar or barbecue.
About SGAC
SGAC works on the international, national and local level to link together university students and young professionals to think creatively about international space policy issues and inject the youth point of view into international space policy creation.
For a quick overview on what SGAC does, please see our current SGAC brochure available here.
SGAC’s Goal is…
- …to provide access to our members to inject their thoughts, views and opinions on the direction of international space policy
Other goals are…
- …to undertake projects on key topics of relevance to international space policy and our members
- …to present the student and young professional viewpoint around the world
- …to provide a dynamic forum in which students and young professionals can expand their knowledge of international space policy issues, build networks and think creatively about the future direction of humanity’s use of space
At the end of every year, SGAC releases a strategic plan for the upcoming year which encapsulates our key initiatives. This strategy not only defines our annual direction, it also acts as a benchmark for assessing our progress annually.
SGAC Activities
SGAC’s activities are encapsulated in its annual report which can be found below, which lists its ~90 countries’ activities:
A condensed summary of activities of SGAC can be read here:
Join SGAC!!!
Benefits of joining:
- Being part of the voice of the next generation of space sector leaders: Have direct input on projects representing the youth view on space topics whose results have the direct ears and eyes of high-level leaders of current government, industry, and non-governmental organisations
- Participating in top space events designed for university students and young professionals: Attend SGAC high-energy and high-impact conferences, outreach events, and gatherings around the world
- Receiving exclusive scholarships and opportunities: SGAC and its partners sponsor members to attend conferences and to participate in panels, competitions, and positions only open to SGAC members
- Networking: Meet up-and-coming international leaders in all areas of the space sector
- Staying in the space loop: Receive updated news, job-postings, and information from all corners of the global space sector
For further information, visit: http://spacegeneration.org/index.php/get-involved/become-a-member
Get in touch!
Please feel free to visit our United Kingdom country page here and to get in touch with your UK National Points of Contact for SGAC below:
Jane MacArthur
(jane.macarthur@spacegeneration.org)
Currently studying an MSc in Planetary Science at University College London (UCL).
Fellow of the Royal Astronomical Society (FRAS), Member of the British Interplanetary Society (MBIS), Member of the Society for Popular Astronomy (SPA).
Jane has a wide international network of space friends and contacts drawn from her experiences and would be happy to help you find links and space connections in other countries.
- Space shuttle launch, Florida, USA
- Arctic Science course, in Kiruna, Sweden
- ATV Tweetup, Toulouse, France
- ISS Symposium, Berlin, Germany
- SpaceFest, in Arizona, USA
- JPL Open House weekend, California, USA
- Alpbach Summer School, Alpbach, Austria
- SpaceUp EU, Genk, Belgium
- European Planetary Science Congress 2012, Madrid, Spain
- Post-Alpbach course, Graz, Austria
- Austrian Space Forum, Mars simulation in Morocco
- In contact with many ISU alumni
Click here for Jane’s space blog or follow her on Twitter: @Jane_MacArthur
Ryan Laird
Fellow of the Royal Astronomical Society (FRAS), FRAS; Member of the British Interplanetary Society (MBIS); Associate Member of the Institute of Physics (AMInstP).
Previously helped in organising the UK Space Conference at Charterhouse School, Surrey. Secretary of UKSEDS 2012/13 and 2013/14.
Student Representative of the UK for the International Year of Astronomy (IYA) 2009. Has since kept in touch with a wide network of space friends from all around the world.
Recently attended SGAC’s Space Generation Congress in Naples, Italy. Represented SGAC and presented at the United Nations Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space (UN COPUOS) Scientific and Technical Subcommittee (STSC). Currently working at SGAC’s office as intern.
Click here for Ryan’s website. His full profile can be found here.
Follow him on Twitter: @rjmlaird
DAY 1 outreach volunteers at Big Bang Fair 2013
The Big Bang Fair is UK’s largest science festival. The event held at the London Excel Centre, drew audiences from around the UK and Europe with its many interactive activities, competitions and shows. UKSEDS was kindly offered a stand in the Next Factor area right next to Herschel Space telescope and Kennedy Space Centre. Over the course of 4 days the event saw over 20,000 attendees, but this was no challenge to our team who easily engaged them into some fun meteorite identifying activities and getting messy with our meteorite crater making activity.
Captain Jon McBride testing his meteorite detective skills
Day 3, our outreach volunteer on Fruit Astronaut
Our stand saw well known science names such as TV presenter Dallas Campbell, Astronomer Nick Howes and Astronaut Captain Jon McBride give time out of their busy schedules to lend us a hand with our activities. We also had special guest Alex Cureton-Griffiths from SpaceGAMBIT who brought along his Fruit Astronaut activity. The squishing and squeezing of fruit to control Space Invaders was a huge hit with kids and adults alike and lets just say we went through a whole lot of bananas!
Overall another successful event from the Outreach team.
If you would like to get involved in future events such as this one please email outreach@ukseds.org
This past weekend UKSEDS volunteers were found science busking in Oxford town centre’s Bonn square. The event as part of ‘Science in your world’, opened up OSF 2013 and drew the presence of companies such as SIEMENS, Medical research council, STFC and many more.
The outreach team had fun participating in the range of activities including floating superconductors, infra-red cameras and water distilling. Our team also made a lasting impression with the oxford locals with our ‘Meteorite Meteorwrong’ activity!
The event attracted not only record-breaking attendance figures, but was also a big buzz on facebook, twitter, the radio and beyond. We had at least 5500 people come and visit the stalls; the biggest yet. Overall it was a fantastic and successful event!
Check out our pics below. OSF runs through til 24th March 2013, so if you are in the area, please do check out some of the other activities going on. For more info see
